The way false friars flatter is by offering easy absolution, flattering you that you are in the state of grace, in exchange for a donation, as Friar Flatterer does at the end of the poem, 22.363–70 (B.20.363–70). See 22.235n, 313–15n, and Lawler 2006.
78–79 Ac me thynketh … yclothed: Although the Wycliffite translation was probably in circulation by the time of C, Thogh y latyn knowe 78 alludes primarily to the same idea that is in B, that since the bible was unavailable in English its “warning”—the doctored verse from Jeremiah quoted in B—is only known to Latinists, but perhaps secondarily also to the fact that the double meaning of frater is not reproducible in English.
The apology (me thynketh loth … to lacken) seems utterly perfunctory, of course, since the damage is done. Its exact nature, nevertheless, is teasing. In all likelihood, the referent of 78 secte is to the whole class of friars, and line 79 refers, not to the different habits worn by different orders, but to the differences between the “frere frokke” (16.355) in general and the dress of secular clergy or laymen. (Some have thought, however, that L was a friar; Lawrence Clopper in particular thought it “probable” [1997:325]; see his careful discussions in his Introduction, 1–24 and his Afterword, 325–33; and see 47–50a [B.13.42–45a] note above). Wyclif liked to call the fraternal orders “sects,” though he also uses the word to designate whole classes of religious such as friars, monks, canons (see his De fundatione sectarum, in Polemical Works, I, 13–80 and Szittya 1986:180–82). For L the word “secte” almost always means clothing, that is, the characteristic garb of a profession or class or order; he may have used it interchangeably with “sute.” See 12.133 (B.11.245; 16.357 (B.15.232); 6.38; 16.97, 99 (B.14.257, 259); also 7.129, 136, 140 (B.5.487, 490, 496), “in oure secte,” where it is a metaphor for “flesh.” Even when he uses it to mean the class or order itself, as at 15.13 or 16.295, the idea of clothing is at least implicitly present, since so many groups in medieval society had a characteristic dress. And indeed what is meant here may be something much broader than friars vs. seculars or laymen: it may refer to the variety of professions in general: cf. the diuisiones gratiarum, 21.227–55, esp. 254, “Loke þat noen lacke oþere (sc. craft) bute loueth as bretherne”; and see 12.110, 116: Christ’s blood made us brothers.
As for not “lacking”: Will has already been told by five teacher figures not to lack: 2.51 (B.2.248) (Holy Church); 8.85 (Piers); 12.40 (B.11.106) (Leaute); 13.206 (B.11.388) (Reason); 14.6 (cf. B.12.97) (Ymaginatif), and will be told so again by two more: 19.103 (Hope) and 21.254 (B.19.254) (Grace). Thus, perfunctory though it seems, the apology (like that at 13.26, “leueth nat … þat y lacke rychesse” or B.15.249, “Ac I ne lakke no lif”) should probably be taken as a sincere attempt, however brief, on Will’s part to be patient (so Pearsall in his first edition, citing 13.205–6). (On the near absence of the verb lakken in the A version, and its burgeoning importance in the B version, see Lawler 1996:163–65.)
80 fyue mendynantʒ: One of three references in the C version to five orders of friars; the others are at 8.191 (“alle þe fyue ordres”) and 9.344 (“alle fyue ordres”). But Prol.56 retains foure, the number used in A and B (A.Prol.55, B.Prol.58 = C.Prol.56; A 8.176 = B 7.198 [where ms. R has fyue] = C 9.145); thus L has retained the AB reading in the Prologue but changed it in passus 9, and added two more references to the orders, and in this one specified mendicants). He is by no means alone in speaking of five orders. Jack Upland mentions “þe fyue ordris” (83) objected to in Friar Daw’s Reply 84, which insists that there are only four. And wills provide further evidence: see below.
Four is, of course, the standard number, going back ultimately to the Council of Lyons of 1274, which (mainly to place a limit on mendicancy) prohibited all orders of friars except the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians from taking in novices, and so ensured their gradual extinction. However certain orders managed to elude this edict, apparently because they had sufficient endowment to make begging unnecessary. These included the Trinitarians and the Friars of the Holy Cross or Crutched Friars, both of whom maintained houses in England right up to the dissolution by Henry the Eighth in 1534–38. Since neither of these groups were mendicants, however, the phrase here raises doubt whether either can be what L had in mind. On this basis Ralph Hanna, in his note to 8.191 above, has settled on the Pied Friars, an offshoot of the Carmelites who did beg.
A small piece of evidence on the matter is provided by Chaucer’s translation of the Romance of the Rose (ll. 7456–60), listing five orders, Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Carmelites, and Sacks (where the French text [ed. Lecoy, ll.12102–7] lists four: it has the Sacks but not the Augustinians). Andrews 2006:221 asserts that the Friars of the Sack were gone by early in the fourteenth century, but argues (222) that this line in RR helped keep their memory alive.
Despite Ralph Hanna’s conclusion, and despite Chaucer’s keeping the Sacks, when I weigh all the evidence it seems to me that the likeliest candidate for the fifth order—unless it is an ironic reference to the hermits on the highway who beg in friar-clothing and are called friars, C.9.189–255—is indeed the Crutched Friars, for whose activity in London in the late fourteenth century there is ample evidence. They had a house in St Olave’s parish near the Tower, on a street adjacent to the street still called Crutched Friars Street (in the City, a block south of Aldgate Street) (Röhrkasten 2004:62). Their strong presence in London is evident in the taxation rolls cited in McHardy, 1977; see her index, s.v. Crutched Friars. For the phrase “five orders,” see especially Röhrkasten 1996:473 and Virginia Davis, “Mendicants” and Clergy, passim. Davis in Clergy 33n says that the Crutched Friars, though “not technically a mendicant order” were “usually treated as such,” and says that in “many London wills” “bequests are left ‘to the five orders of friars’”; she cites one such will. See also her “Mendicants,” esp. p. 4. and n23. Even more aptly for our purpose, Röhrkasten, whose study of bequests to friars in wills is definitive, says that “Only about 10 per cent of the testators mentioned the number of five mendicant orders while 18.5 percent indicated that as far as they were concerned there were only four friaries in the city. This does not mean that they ignored the Crutched Friars; on the contrary, many of this group not only included the smallest of the convents in their wills but actually named them together with the others, maintaining the differentiation” (1996:473). In a note he cites a typical such differentiation: “Cuilibet domui fratrum XII denarios ac etiam domui S. Crucis XII denarios” (To each house of friars twelve pence, and twelve pence also to the house of the Holy Cross). This suggests that Langland’s “four” and “five” are both normal. Hayden 1995 lists English ordinations to the order, and shows ample activity, mostly in London, throughout the second half of the fourteenth century. P. L. Heyworth, in his edition of Jack Upland, p. 119, opts for the Crutched Friars. They were still around in 1534: see Roth 1966: 2.445–46.
Meanwhile, Robert Swanson, whose knowledge of the fourteenth-century English church is unrivaled, has suggested that the fifth order may be the Trinitarians, who were not friars but were often thought to be friars, and were more numerous and prominent than the Crutched Friars. See Swanson 2007: 63–64, 144–45.
82–83 (B.13.76–77) They preche … tholede: The friar preaches penance, as the apostles did when they went out in twos (Mark 6:12), and as Francis did in imitation of them (Celano, First Life, 1.22, 23, Habig 1983:247);